The invention relates to compositions, methods, and apparatuses for reducing the amount of water required for various water using stages of a beverage manufacturing operation.
Beverage manufacturing operations (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) require the use of water in many stages. These stages can include but are not limited to pasteurization, vacuum pump sealing, fermentation, kettle brewing, and bottle washing. In addition equipment and maintenance operations such as cooling towers, heat exchangers, boilers, floor-washing, and crate-washing also require water.
The use of so much water in beverage manufacturing operations results in water costs being one of (if not the) dominant cost of operations. As result there is ongoing desire to reduce the use of water in beverage manufacturing operations. Ideally to reduce water use one would take the used water from one such operation and use it as a feed source to another use. In practice however this is mostly impossible because the various uses in the stages of beverage manufacturing operations render the water unfit as a feed stock. As a result there is clear utility in novel methods of reducing the use of water in a beverage manufacturing operation.
The art described in this section is not intended to constitute an admission that any patent, publication or other information referred to herein is “prior art” with respect to this invention, unless specifically designated as such. In addition, this section should not be construed to mean that a search has been made or that no other pertinent information as defined in 37 CFR §1.56(a) exists.